PlayStation 3 vs Xbox 360 strengths

Shortly after our 11 Mistakes of the Xbox 360, we talked about the seven things that the Xbox 360 special. Let’s see how the PlayStation 3 competes on these 7 fronts...

1. Development Environment

The Xbox 360 continues to offer one of the best development environments of any gaming platform today. A look at games like Rainbow Six: Vegas and Gears of War is enough proof of how Microsoft’s design allows them to succeed.

But this is more than just software support. It’s hardware. To understand what I’m talking about, we need to step back in time to the time when Sony launched the PlayStation 2. Although the hype of the “Emotion Engine” proved to offer little substance, the PS2’s atypical system architecture with parallel vector units and a high-fillrate fixed-function 3D pipeline helped it to produce games such as Gran Turismo 4, Final Fantasy XII, and the Metal Gear Solid series. Indeed, it is a true testament to the vision of Sony’s engineers and marketing department that the PS2 established such overwhelming market dominance.

At the time the PS2 launched, it seemed as if the PC had little chance of success in the gaming market. The PS2 technology demos were being showcased at a time when NVIDIA’s flagship graphics chip was the Riva TNT2. The PS2 completely outclassed the comparable PC of the time, and when Metal Gear Solid 2 came out, it truly was a marvel both in terms of gameplay and technology.

In the same way, the launch of the Xbox 360 represented that same scenario. The three-core PowerPC CPU in the Xbox360 and AMD-powered GPU with a unified shader architecture represented hardware capabilities beyond anything that was available for the PC at the time. Indeed, it is only recently with the release of products such as the GeForce 8800 and Intel Core 2 Duo that the PC has regained in dominance in the gaming world.

Along the same lines, the PlayStation 3 has been released to the world with a substantial promise of computational power. Once again, Sony’s insistence on “non-traditional” architecture persists, with the use of the Cell processor. However in this generation, the GPU in the PS3 is a tried-and-true GeForce 7-class GPU.